The sixties was the decade when the frightened cry of “Timber!” was everywhere in the unclean air of publishing. The flow of competitive daily newspapers dried up, and magazines great and small fell like the trees chopped down for the paper to print them.
Now that the flagship Life Magazine has joined its lessers in the Sargasso Sea of bestilled publications, some conventional wisdom prevails as to how American publishing became trapped in such an economic rat hole: spiraling production costs, quadrupling postage rates, blood-sucking competition for advertising dollars from television, the general malaise of the economy, mass circulations sustained at uneconomical cut-rates, the decline of print, et cetera.
None of these reasons, to my way of thinking, explains the big picture. The man who, Cassandralike, doped out what was going to happen, long before the casualty lists began to mount, was Howard Gossage. Hardly anyone listened to him when he was alive and telling why so many papers were going to die. Now he is dead, and has the small epitaph of having been proven right.
Howard began to formulate his stone heresies, centering on the proposition that the reliance of publishing upon advertising was umbilic, transitory and fraught with peril, in the early sixties. He kept it up, and kept upping the ante, until he died in 1969. The decade previous, he had occupied himself throwing wooden chips in the porridge bowl of the advertising industry — here a deserved kick below the belt at the commission system, there a broadside at the billboard industry, here again a swipe at Smokey the Bear.
Howard hated Smokey the Bear.
Smokey was the American advertising industry's gift to the nation, the symbol of that industry's vaunted “public service” campaign, which had the stated purpose of reducing forest fires. Howard was aghast at the very idea that the advertising industry, which was responsible for so much of the glut and waste of consumerism and which had made of the country one giant depository for throw-away products including the automobile, so piously purported to be lending a helping hand to Old Mother Nature.
In fact, Howard said, Smokey the Bear was inept and potentially disastrous in his job; Gossage had amassed considerable statistics to argue that the forests were better off when people weren't breaking their matches, as Smokey so often told them, because numerous small forest fires were part of the state of nature, and the “improvement” rendered by the anti-forest fire campaign had produced a situation where the forests were periled with massive and more ruinous “blockbuster” forest fires. “It's a simple matter of kicking sleeping dogs awake,” Howard would say, when asked the obvious by those among the incredulous who could not savvy why an advertising man would so consistently bite the hands that fed him.
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